Paris Insider

We'll start with a slinky little number recommended by our pals on the fashion desk. Chic Shopping Paris is a renowned tour company offering bespoke shopping tours — "the ins-&-outs that only a good Parisian friend would share with you". Handily, founder Rebecca Perry Magniant runs the company blog, full of valuable tidbits pruned, one assumes, from the tours themselves. The best bits are the tips for your shopping downtime, like Catherine Deneuve's recently redecorated café and salon in the Cinema du Pantheon, and the Christian Lacroix-designed Hotel du Petit Moulin, in the up-and-coming Haute Marais district. Occasionally the little people are thought of too. This post is a keeper, where Rebecca shares her Paris sales strategy. Over at the similarly excellent La Coquette, this post is a great rundown of her favourite places to shop in Paris, half of which are thrift, vintage, surplus stock or flea market.

The New York sartorialist

Scott Schuman is one of the online stars of the fashion world, a former director of men's fashion at Bergdorf Goodman in New York, now a prolific photo blogger at The Sartorialist. The blog itself is a series of snaps taken by Schuman, pretty much chronicling anything he sees and digs — his eye for a good look has him included in Time Magazine's Top 100 Design Influences. The SartoriaList section of the blog features the personal tips of a series of New York lookers (more cities coming soon, well, in April 2008 apparently), including the man himself. Elsewhere, the ever-excellent Gridskipper has maps of New York's best trainer stores, vinyl stores and flea markets.

The face of fashion

Photo blogs chronicling particular individual's fancies are prolific on the web, and they all seem to link to each other. Believe me, it's a rabbit hole. The links on the right hand side of the facehunter blog seem to flag up pretty much all of them — hundreds of "street style" blogs around the world, from Amsterdam to Zurich. For the most part this is a long, painfully moreish process of oohing and aahing at the really, really ridiculously good looking people of the world but there is certainly tipster gold in the billions of pics — most will namecheck specific stores and boutiques, if not only in the title, every now and then. This tag on Stil in Berlin, for example, picks out two of its favorite Kreuzberg stores.

Cool store hunting

The Cool Hunter's "stores" tag is always worth keeping an eye on, as is much of the site, for its hopelessly modish trendseeking and its fine array of pretty pictures. The stuff is generally high-end, but it's one of the most enjoyable online window shops you can have. Their descriptions would put even the most daring of wine critics to shame - the JC/DC Store in Paris has "an air of theatre without being theatrical, drama without being dramatic and history without being historical. A retro, semi-aggressive undertone, propped up by whimsy and surprise." Which is nice. Boutique Beams in Tokyo is a great find — applying the idea of a sushi conveyor belt to T-shirts. Their profiling of Chicago's Boring Store shows that even the haughtiest of fashonistas have a sense of humour — the store deliberately sells nothing of any utility, specialising in comedic spy gadgets.

Material world

You may have noticed a theme by now - most of the blogosphere's fashion offerings have a distinct lack of editorial grace. But who needs syntax when you've got style, eh? Condé Nast Traveller's The Materialist is a shining exception, in particular the excellently penned adventures of shopping correspondent Nandita Khanna. The recent posts are a little America-centric, but a browse through the archives will find plenty of tales of her various sartorial field trips, filled with recommendations and links. This post on her trip to Jaipur highlights Hot Pink, a boutique owned by French jeweler Marie-Helene de Taillac, and the wares of Namarata Joshipura, "Anna Sui meets Gaultier in Goa". Elsewhere, she hunts through Istanbul bazaars for silk ikats, embroidered wools and cotton weaves.